The U.S. Department of Energy will be celebrating Earth Week April 18-22 in the Forrestal Building and April 25-29 in Germantown.

Many of the program offices, including the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) will have displays, plus there will be activities such as environmental films, green bag lunches, speakers, nature walks and talks, tree plantings, Bring Sons and Daughters to Work Day activities, farmers marketand community days. The Earth Week activities are sure to be fun, and to see how the Department is “Changing Behavior to Reduce DOE’s Carbon Footprint.”

While you are enjoying the Earth Week displays and activities, be sure to stop by and see OSTI where we will feature DOE Green Energy, your portal to green energy information from thousands of DOE-sponsored research and development projects. DOE Green Energy provides free access to over 30,000 full text technical reports and over 2,000 patents.

Energy continues to be much in the news these days; rising gas prices affect all Americans – families feel the pinch at the pump, and businesses and farmers see the increased costs impact their bottom line.

Much has been written in this blog about WorldWideScience.org. As regular readers well know, it is a global gateway to scientific and technical databases conceived, developed, and operated by the US Department of Energy’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information.

DOE OSTI recently hosted a graduate student from the University of Michigan (UM) School of Information (SI) for a week in our Germantown offices. The student, Ryan Tabor, was participating in the UM SI Alternative Spring Break (ASB) program, which matches graduate students with professional-experience projects identified by host organizations. Ryan's graduate school specialty area is human-computer interaction. That, coupled with his undergraduate degree in psychology and his work experience on IT Help Desks, created a great match for OSTI's project -- a usability study of DOE R&D Accomplishments.

The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs were established to provide funding to stimulate technological innovation in small businesses to meet federal agency research and development needs. Under SBIR, federal agencies with large R&D budgets set aside a small fraction of their funding for competitions exclusively among small businesses. Each year, the DOE Office of Science sets aside 2.8% of its research budget for SBIR (2.5%) and STTR (.3%) awards. Small businesses that win SBIR awards keep the rights to any technology developed and are encouraged to commercialize the technology.

Established in 1947, the DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) fulfills the agency’s responsibilities to collect, preserve and disseminate scientific and technical information (STI) emanating from DOE R&D activities. OSTI’s mission is to advance science and sustain creativity by making R&D findings available to DOE and other researchers and the public. OSTI is founded on the principle that science progresses only if knowledge is shared; furthermore, OSTI is animated by the concept, now widely accepted, that accelerating the sharing of knowledge accelerates the advancement of science. SBIR projects have been integral to OSTI’s success in speeding access to scientific knowledge to speed discovery, innovation and economic progress.